The results are in

The first time I voted for president I was 5-years-old and it was a mock election, but there was no point in telling me my vote didn’t count.

I still remember how excited I was stepping into that cardboard refrigerator box turned voting booth to cast my ballot.

I won’t tell you how I voted — reporters aren’t supposed to do that — but I will share some results from other mock elections.

Lots of school kids have been voting over the past several days, including Northside Independent School District’s Vale Middle School, which divided the campus into precincts and required students to register before they could vote.

Vale’s election was part of a district-wide mock election in which 26 middle and high schools took part. A few schools will vote tomorrow, but results are in for more than 24,000 Northside students.

The Barack Obama/ Joseph Biden ticket won by a landslide 62.3 percent, with the John McCain/ Sarah Palin ticket taking 34.4 percent of the vote. Third party or write-in candidates made up the difference.

O’Connor High School and Jefferson Middle School were the only Northside schools to swing Republican.

The University of Virginia’s Youth Leadership Initiative holds a national student mock election and though the project is not intended to be a used as predictor, the students are pretty darn good — at least when it comes to picking a president.

“We’ve been doing the mock election since 2000 and the kids have never gotten it wrong,” said spokesman Cordel Faulk.

More than three million students around the country voted in the YLI mock before polls closed last week. Obama took 60 percent of that vote.

In Texas, 55.2 percent of YLI voters chose the Obama/Biden ticket and 41.9 voted for McCain/Palin.

The Senate race was closer. There Republican incumbent John Cornyn (45.89) held a razor thin edge over Democratic challenger Rick Noriega (43.95).

In the red state of Virginia, which many pundits say McCain will need to win if he’s going to stack up enough electoral college votes tomorrow, the YLI student voters chose Obama (59.7) by a wide margin. McCain took 35.5 percent of the vote.

If your school or district has tallied the results of its mock election, let us know and we’ll post the results here.